Thank you very much indeed. Good evening, everybody. Thanks very much for, for logging off after a long day at work.

So we're gonna be talking about, puppies tonight and about, developing emotional intelligence. So I explain a bit more about what that means as we go through. So, if we think about emotional intelligence in terms of a human definition, the main definition that you hear is the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.

And if we think about that in terms of the companion animals that we're dealing with, and dogs that we're talking about tonight, probably the most important The elements of that are the ability to express your emotions and the ability to control emotions. In terms of handling interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically, we certainly do expect our canine companions to handle interpersonal relationships well, particularly with other dogs, because, obviously our, our dog, Companions tend to spend time interacting with other dogs, whether it's on walks or many of them these days at things like doggy daycare. So they have a lot of canine interactions, but also, of course, handling their relationships with human beings as well.

And there are quite quite drastic legal implications of getting that wrong because of the things like the Dangerous Dogs Act, which obviously expect far more than is really reasonable in terms of, dog-human interactions, but it's something that is. Under the legal umbrella, and therefore we need to take very seriously. So we're gonna be looking at how we, think about emotional intelligence being developed in our puppies so that they can be adult dogs who are able to express and control their own emotions and handle their relationships, both with dogs and with people in ways that are beneficial to everybody.

So teaching emotional intelligence is a process of exposure, and that's probably the thing that most people think about when they think about, having puppies and preparing them for life. There's been a lot of emphasis in the past on the processes of socialisation, habituation, which obviously are very important. But tonight, what we're gonna be talking about is taking that step.

Further, understanding a little bit more deeply how puppies develop at this age and how we can help them to be more emotionally intelligent as a result. So, yes, we do want to expose them to a variety of contexts. And the purpose of that is to establish suitable emotional associations.

So what we're really aiming to do is create positive Emotional associations with elements of a domestic environment which could otherwise prove challenging for a dog living so closely with people. So we see things like interacting with other dogs, socialisation towards other dogs being important. We see in the middle, both socialisation towards people, but also the following of cues.

So the idea of teaching manners, the whole concept of obedience training, as it's often referred to. And actually what we're talking about there is being able to control the way they express themselves, to be able to do so, appropriately for the context that they find themselves in. And then we see here on the right-hand side, obviously, they also need to be habituated to things that are very human, like travelling in a car or being in noisy environments.

So there are things that are very much a human environment habituation process that we want our domestic dogs to go through. But as well as being exposed, what we also want is for those dogs to be rewarded for making good decisions, because what we talked about in that definition of emotional intelligence was the ability to have control of their emotions. So what we want is that when they have an emotional response, that they have different ways of responding to those emotions, and we want these dogs to learn to select the most appropriate response for the circumstance that they're in.

So it's OK in a situation where a dog meets someone that they've never met before, maybe someone who's very different from everyone else they've ever seen before, for them to have some level of fear, anxiety, motivation when they see them. In other words, a reaction to lack of familiarity. That's not abnormal.

But what's really important is that those animals with emotional intelligence learn how to express that anxiety and worry. So the best way to do that would be to either use avoidance or just to stay out of the way. We're not talking there about running away.

We're talking about just keeping your distance until you're more certain, or inhibition, where they're just taking in information passively. And not to use it, responses like repulsions. So we don't want them to feel that when they're in a situation when they're worried about something, that the, the suitable thing is to make that threat go away by using repelling behaviours like growling, etc.

So it's about, yes, exposing them, making positive associations, and teaching them what to do with their emotional responses in terms of how they respond with their behaviour. Before we go on to talk about how we do that, I just want to look at some other concepts that are important when we're dealing with emotional health. So emotional intelligence is the overriding ability to identify and control your emotions.

But there's some other important things that we need to consider. One is called emotional stability. So emotional stability is basically this individual's ability to remain stable and balanced in the circumstance.

It finds itself. That doesn't mean that you are emotionally static. So you're going to have emotional responses.

And as I say, sometimes those res emotions that we consider to be negative may be appropriate. So if you've never been in a situation before, it actually makes sense to be slightly anxious, to have a perception that it could go wrong. What matters is how you deal with that, and whether that stays within what we call your emotional capacity.

So basically, your emotional capacity is how much emotional arousal, or how much motivation of your emotions you can tolerate without having a significant or a long lasting negative effect on you. And that's to do with the fact that when we have these emotional responses, we need to have enough. Metaphorical room, if you like, for that emotion to be dealt with without exceeding our capacity.

And then we have the concept of emotional resilience. It's a word that's talked about quite a lot in human, child development, the idea of developing emotional, resilience. This is really important as well in our companion dogs that they learn to be able to bounce back.

So the word resilience comes from. The Latin word resilio meaning to bounce back, so it's not about living in a world that has no emotional challenge because that would not be normal, so all the world has potential to be emotionally challenging. So what we want to do, instead of eliminating that, we want to have an animal who can tackle or can accept those problems or those challenges, and get on with their life without it causing any damage.

So when they have an emotional response, they can bounce back from that. So emotional stability is going to be influenced by many different factors. And anyone who is engaged in looking after dogs has got a role in ensuring that the puppies that we are interacting with and growing through adolescence into adulthood, that they become emotionally stable.

So whether that's us, as veterinary professionals, or whether people involved in training or in dog care through things like doggy daycare, or groomers. Anybody who is involved with dogs has got a role in this process. But probably the person who's got the highest level of responsibility, in terms of setting the puppy on the right road, would be breeders.

And breeders have got a level of responsibility on responsibility on different levels. So, first of all, they have to think about the selection of their breeding stock, because we know that being emotionally stable is something which is very important in a pregnant, but also a nursing bitch. So, because we know that when these, puppies are in utero, the emotional state of their will affect the development of their hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis.

So the HPA axis, which is your stress control mechanism, is developing when you're in utero, and the stress level of your mother, that's the physiological stress that comes from your emotional responses, can influence that. And it doesn't mean that you don't want that bitch to go through any emotions, because actually that system needs to be primed. So it's normal for the bitch to go through emotional responses and to have levels of physiological stress.

What's important is that that bitch is emotionally stable, has a good capacity and good resilience. So selecting that breeding stock is really important. The other thing is how they care for those bitches while they're pregnant because of that potential for the emotional state of a pregnant bitch to affect the development of their unborn puppies.

And there's the the need for breeders to think about the early rearing of puppies. And probably when we talk about puppy rearing, we do talk about early rearing. We talked about, quite commonly about owners being advised to be careful where they get the puppy from in terms of how the puppies are being reared.

But looking one step back from that and looking at the bitch herself as well, preferably as as well, looking at the sire in terms of selection of breeding stock is really important in aiming for emotionally stable puppies. And then we move on to the guardians or caregivers who actually are going to look after this animal after they take it on as a small puppy, hopefully through the rest of its life, and they have a really specific level of responsibility too. So first of all, that new home needs to be optimal in terms of both the physical and the social environment.

And what we mean by an optimal environment is one that caters for every species specific need. So everything you need in order to be a dog needs to be available within. This household, both in terms of the physical environment, so things like having a safe, secure resting place, also the social environment, so having, predictable and consistent social interaction with both humans and potentially other dogs and even other species.

And then we also need to think about how that guardian or caregiver is going to provide this puppy with the opportunity for beneficial learning. So what do we want them to be learning? Well, during the learning process.

Especially this process of developing emotional resilience and emotional intelligence, classical conditioning becomes really important, because we said that what we want to do is create positive emotional associations. So in classical conditioning, through socialisation and habituation, what We're trying to do is introduce this puppy to social contact, for socialisation, whether that's with other species, or whether it's with other dogs, and habituation with also things that are specific to human existence. And of course, people as well would be involved in socialisation.

So socialisation habituation is classical conditioning of a positive emotional response to a variety of different social and environmental stimuli. The other thing that's done through classical conditioning is house training. House training, of course, incredibly important because for dogs to live successfully with humans, we do need them to be able to differentiate between an indoor environment and an outdoor environment in terms of toileting.

And inappropriate house soiling or unsuccessful house training can lead to quite extreme emotional challenge for the puppy because toileting is always a beneficial experience. It's all. Always something that has a positive emotional effect on the individual.

And when you are engaged in a natural behaviour, which is inherently rewarding, for which you can become externally punished, that leads to what we call emotional conflict. So setting puppies up for positive house training is really important in terms of setting them on the road towards this emotional stability that we're seeking in this emotional intelligence. Now the other form of learning that's important, is operant conditioning.

So operant conditioning, of course, is the learning that involves a consequence. So classical conditioning is the Pavlovian process that I'm sure you're all familiar with. The operant conditioning is where a behaviour results in a consequence, and that consequence then leads.

To repetition of that behaviour. So we use that in what we often referred to as training, the introduction of verbal cues for certain behaviours. So the general sit down, stay, wait, recall, those sorts of behavioural responses that we want to pair to a verbal cue.

And obviously, when we're using a consequence, we want that consequence to be emotionally positive. The other area in which the guardian or the caregiver has a responsibility is in this rewarding of appropriate decision making. So in order to do that well, our owners need to know how to identify responses to emotions, especially the negative emotions, within which there are some potentially detrimental behavioural responses, for example, repulsion.

But also in dogs, we need to remember the potential for appeasement, the gathering of information, to also be socially unacceptable if the animal is too intense in gathering information from people, leading to behaviours like jumping up, licking people, etc. So rewarding appropriate decision making. And most importantly for these guardians and caregivers is set these puppies up to succeed.

Because if we want to develop emotionally intelligent, stable puppies, we want them to live in a world that says, well done. In a world that's focused on what we want them to do, so that we can then praise them for doing it, rather than one which identifies those things that we don't want them to do. So let's look then at emotional capacity in the individual.

So emotional stability depends on having an adequate emotional capacity. And a model that I developed in about 2010 was this idea of an emotional sink as a way of explaining, pay potentially to clients to start with, how they could think about their pet every day as to whether it was likely to be coping with the environment that they were putting it into. So the idea is that this sink is obviously a metaphorical holding vessel for your emotions, and there's a lot of individual variation in the amount of challenge that an animal can withstand before there are significant behavioural consequences.

And this is really important, particularly in people who are taking on a new dog. Often they've got a memory of what their previous dog was capable of, what their previous dog coped with. And it's quite common for people to assume that because their previous dog coped with XYZ, that that's what dogs do.

And what's important is for us to understand. That just as we are all individuals and have different emotional capacities, different thresholds at which we're not going to be able to cope, the same is true of other mammalian species as well. And so the dog is going to be an individual in terms of its emotional capacity.

So what actually determines the size of this sink then? Well, it's decided, first of all, by the genetics of the parents and of the relatives of those, of those puppies. So, particularly the bitch, because of the fact that not only is there a genetic component from the bitch, but there's also her.

Emotional component during the pregnancy, which we'll talk about again in a second, but also the genetics of other parents, the sire, is also important, and other relatives, because we can actually select for higher levels of emotional capacity. So we talk about the genetics as being like a lump of clay on a potter's wheel that you then mould into your ultimate sink size. So that's your potential size of your sink.

And then for the 1st 8 weeks of life, puppy's emotional capacity is being moulded out of that clay. So it's a bit like that piece of clay being developed on the potter's wheel into a wibbly wobbly grey structure. So by 8 weeks of age, you're going to have a potential size.

But if you think about that analogy of the potter's wheel, that wibbly wobbly grey structure is actually very vulnerable. You may have, seen the purple bricks advert where the person, collapses, at first, their own grey wibbly wobbly structure and then their neighbours. It doesn't take much for that structure to collapse if something negative happens.

Equally, that sink is potentially able to grow if we do good things to it. So if you apply the right sort of touch to that wibbly wobbly grey structure, you will maximise its potential. So that 1st 8 weeks of life is crucially important in terms of the sink size.

And then during the first year or so of life, we go through the equivalent in the, in the Potter's wheel analogy of firing that vessel to make it into its ultimate capacity. So it's going to be more resilient in terms of being modified in its size. So, the better the firing process, then the more stable that, vessel will be.

The more you, it will be more difficult it will be, to decrease the size of it. And so what happens is that as you get into that year of life and towards the end of the first year, basically, you're going to need much more intense, good experiences to increase the capacity, but also much more significant negative experiences to decrease the capacity. So what we really want is good genetics, good emotionally stable parents and relatives, with a bitch with good emotional stability, an environment that provides a good level of positive emotional association both with physical and social interactions, so physical environment.

Objects, experiences, and social environment, dogs, people, maybe other species like cats, and then experiences during that first year of life, which work on that good start and create a resilient and a, a, a good capacity sink. And then we have the concept of your emotional valence. I said before that actually negative emotion is not a term that means that the emotion is bad.

So I think it's difficult with the words positive and negative, because we often think of them as meaning good and bad, but positive and negative emotions are all useful. They're all normal. They all have a role to play in survival.

So positive emotions generally are those that are designed to attract you into a situation, and negative emotions are those that are designed to avoid, to enable you to avoid interaction. So negative and positive in the way of approaching or avoiding rather than in terms of being good or bad. So the emotional motivational states in mammals were first identified by Jack P Passe, and it's his model that really is the basis of, veterinary behavioural medicine as we know it.

And so positive emotions, we think of those in the synch logy as being like the equivalent of the cold tap. So when you have an emotional trigger for any of these 4 positive emotions, you're like turning on that cold tap. That is emotional inflow, which is gonna go into that sink that we just talked about.

Desire seeking is the emotion that drives you to have contact with anything that's needed for your survival. That would be food, it would be a resting. Place, it'd be somewhere safe to toilet.

It would also, for a dog, who is a socially obligate mammal, be the need to have contact socially, either with your own species or with the substitute species of humans in the domestic environment, or both, as most dogs or many dogs do have. Even if they don't live with the dog, they usually do have some interaction with other dogs in terms of walking. So desire seeking is about social contact and company, whereas the second one on this social play is about engaging with another individual of your own species.

So social play is designed to be, is an emotion that is driving behavioural responses of playing with your own species. What's quite important. About social play is that it's very context-specific.

So each member of a species will set the context of social play, and the behaviours that happen within that context can actually be quite threatening, but because it's a play context, they don't induce negative emotion in the other individual. So social play is a positive emotion, as is lust, which obviously leads to attraction to a potential for reproduction and care, which is the positive emotional state, which drives a nurturer, usually a mother, but not always. This is a socially obligate species, so social relationships are not just.

Maternal relationships but care is where you are giving nurturing to another member of your species. Now obviously humans also display care behaviour to a range of other species and there are various reports of evidence of other species carrying across species boundaries. The negative emotions, we can think of those as the hot tap.

So the negative emotions of fear, anxiety. Obviously, these are the emotions which are associated with potential for threat to your safety. They are things that could potentially cause threat to your resources.

So triggers. Of fear anxiety is anything that could cause threat. And pain is like a subset, if you like, of fear anxiety, where that threat is to your actual physical body.

So, obviously, we can induce a pain response when we do surgical procedures, for example. Frustration as well. Frustration is a negative emotion associated with an inability to achieve another expected outcome.

So frustration would be seen alongside the other emotional systems, and panic grief is an emotional system which is related to the loss. Of someone nurturing you. So it would be that emotional response of a puppy when their mother walks away from them, when they are in the helping box and she leaves, and you see that distress in the puppy, that would be a panic grief response, which is basically a response to having lost nurturing.

We see in many situations, particularly for domestic dogs who are living in challenging environments, that sometimes more than one emotion can be activated by the same situation, and that leads to what we call emotional conflict. So think of that as the mixer taps when you've got both a positive and a negative emotion being triggered by the same scenario. So, for example, if you have a situation where a, a dog wants to Get to another dog in order to socially play.

So there's a social play motivation to go towards another dog, but the owner is restricting them by holding them back on a lead. You may have social play and frustration being activated at the same time. And that would lead to emotional conflict, more than one emotional input.

And that obviously increases the rate with which your emotional capacity fills. If you've got both taps on, then that sink's gonna fill up more quickly. Emotional resilience is the other side of the coin, if you like.

So the input is the triggering of the emotion, and then we need to make sure that once that trigger has happened, once you've had the emotional response and the behavioural response, and it's been dealt with, that, emotion needs to be got rid of. And we think about that as the drainage. So the equivalent of letting the water out of the sink.

And if you do that reliably after each emotional encounter, you end up with a sink that doesn't hold on to residue. So you can maintain a low level of residue if you have a drainage that is in keeping with, in balance with the input. So what we're looking at is maximising the emotional capacity by making sure that emotional sink isn't carrying dead water in it.

It hasn't got emotion which is no longer needed, sitting in the sink, and also that it doesn't have emotion in the sink, which has been generated by a perception of, for example, threat, where there is none, so unnecessary emotional input. So if we look at the sink analogy, where basically what we're talking about in terms of resilience is the ability to dissipate that emotion, the ability to pull the plug out for that water to go out through the drainage pipe. And then we look at, the dog, the dog has species specific ways of removing, unwanted or unnecessary emotions.

They're like chewing and grooming, and then mammals also have a, a, a non-species specific drainage behaviour of sleep. Now, one of the things for dogs living in a domestic environment often is that actually, they don't. Have the ability to sleep adequately.

And dogs need to sleep between 16 and 18 hours a day. So if you think that most humans sleep for around 8 hours a day, that means that they get 8 hours while their, caregivers are actually asleep, then how are they going to make up that extra 8 to 10 hours of sleep? For many They're so, busy, and particularly more recently because people have started using things like doggy daycare, and therefore not leaving dogs at home, even for half a day, but dropping them somewhere to be stimulated during the whole of the day, that we have a large number of domestic dogs who are in a semi-permanent state of sleep deprivation.

So we need to educate our caregivers when they're starting out on their journey with their puppy that dogs have a much higher requirement for sleep during 24 hours than we do. So these drainage behaviours, this dissipation, they're really significant when we're looking at our patients, when we're looking at puppies, we're looking at how they can develop this intelligence and this capacity. Which is in proportion to the input and the output.

So we have good stability, we need to understand the significance of drainage behaviours. So drainage can happen through that plug hole, however much water there is in the sink. So you could have put a very small amount of water in with a very minimal trigger, and you could still pull the plug out and get rid of it before the next lot comes in.

You don't have to wait to empty your sink until it's full. And actually, if you have regular drainage, then you're more likely to keep that residue low and to maximise your capacity. If, however, your sink does get full, so if we're at the stage where we haven't been able to keep that level at manageable levels, we find that when you do pull the plug out, that water is gonna go out through that, drainage pipe with much more force and intensity.

And so when animals are in a very high state of emotional arousal, what you'll find is that the behaviours which are designed to dissipate that emotion are done more intensely. And so we'll often see in puppies that they chew, and when they're chewing, obviously, some of that chewing may have dental implications in terms of teeth eruption. But some of that chewing is also this drainage behaviour.

And one of the problems that we have in domestic dogs is often that they are discouraged from chewing once the owner believes that teething is over. So they see chewing as a behaviour that's acceptable. In a puppy, if it's teething, but as it gets past that age, that chewing is something they should grow out of.

Well, actually, all dogs need to chew. It's a lifelong behaviour, and it's a very important behaviour in terms of their emotional, stability. So when we're watching dogs chew, we also need to be looking at how they're doing it.

Puppies that have good emotional stability will be able to chew quite quietly, without much intensity, and do it on a regular basis. If we have a dog, for example, that picks up things and chews. Frantically on them when visitors come, for example, then what that tells us is that the arrival of the visitor has caused a level of input of emotion that may be positive, it may be negative, which has increased that level of arousal.

So your sink doesn't have to be full of hot water. So emotional arousal is the amount of water in your sink. It doesn't tell you which type of emotion is in there.

And the same happens when we think about displacement. So displacement is the behavioural equivalent to the overflow hole at the top of the sink, and displacement is always associated with a high level of arousal. So whereas drainage can happen, however much water there is, displacement can only happen if the sink is full, because that little overflow hole can't be activated, it can't have water going through it if the level isn't high enough.

The other thing that's importantly different between displacement and drainage is that that water will go out of that overflow hole just because the water is at the right level. So there's no conscious control over that dissipation through the overflow hole. So this is going to be displacement behaviour, which is not consciously controlled, that happens whenever the emotional arousal level reaches that high point.

And again, maybe emotion that's positive, maybe emotion that's negative, or maybe a combination of the two. And these behaviours, these displacement behaviours are normal behaviours in an abnormal context. So scratching, stretching, yawning, shaking as if you're wet, chewing of feet, licking of lips.

These are all behaviours that say the animal is in a high level of emotional. Arousal. What's important then is to look at the context in which that's happening.

Now, for puppies, it'd be quite normal for them to have higher levels of emotional arousal, because they haven't yet learned how to drain out well. So, when we're looking at these displacement behaviours, they're a good guide as to how well the puppy is maturing in terms of their ability to control those emotions, which was one of the aspects of emotional intelligence. But obviously, emotional overflow is much more likely if you've got a very small sink, or if you've got a lot of negative emotion which is not justified, so you have an emotional disorder, or if you have just emotion which is justified, but is inappropriate because the.

Animal is negative, so it's anxious or fearful or in pain. Those emotions may be justified because the dog may have chronic pain lesions, it may be living in an inappropriate environment. Or if just the hot and cold tap are turned on full.

So the cold tap, even pleasure, can come with too much intensity and exceed the capacity of the individual and cause an emotional problem. And obviously, if you're carrying around a lot of residue, and you've got bad drainage in relation to the input, then that will also be a risk factor. Probably one of the biggest risk factors for domestic dogs is the fact that people don't recognise and act on those species specific signs that this sink is full.

Those displacement behaviours tell us, don't put any more water in this sink. Stop the input, because if you don't, I'm not gonna be able to cope. And because people don't recognise that, domestic animals and dogs, tonight we're talking about, find themselves in situations where they can't emotionally cope.

So, when we look at the risks of flooding, we can see that the genetics, the breeder responsibility, the mother, the small sink comes from that. So we need to make sure we're maximising the ability to get an optimal size of sink. The high inflow, that's going to be influenced by perception.

So the early socialisation habituation influences that. And then we do want owners to understand what puppies need in order to drain. So are they getting enough sleep?

Are they having them like opportunities to chew, and then looking at do owners recognise when that level is getting too high? So to prevent flooding, we're looking at creating good breeding, good rearing and positive life experiences. We're looking at establishing good socialisation and habituation so that we reduce the salience of the things the puppy meets.

So we don't just want there to be a positive emotional association with these new things in the world, but also to have a controlled emotional response. So we don't want puppies to, when they see, oh, there's a person, fantastic, and have a massive inflow of positive emotion. We want them to go, Oh, that's nice, so that there's a steady, low flow rate, which can be coped with in terms of the, relevant drainage.

Creating optimal resilience is by encouraging drainage behaviours, teaching puppies how to chew appropriately and making sure they have adequate rest and they learn how to rest effectively. But we need also to think about the human. Does the person understand the emotional systems?

Do they actually recognise that animals who are not human, also need to be able to respond appropriately and successfully to Natural emotional responses. So for example, they need to be able to play socially with other members of their species. They also need to be, to have access to those things that trigger their desire seeking motivation.

So they need to be able to obtain resting places and food in ways that they have control over and in ways that don't frustrate them, that don't hold those resources back. We also need to know that an animal who is in a state of negative emotion needs to be able to use an avoidance strategy, because that will always be the most socially acceptable of the behavioural strategies where you're in a difficult situation. So when this puppy feels uncomfortable, we want it to learn that the best thing to do is to just take yourself out of that situation.

Don't try and deal with it. And that's something that we often override with puppies. We see them looking a bit fearful, and we go, Oh, no, it's fine.

Come and say hello. And we try to make them engage with this thing that's worrying them, rather than allowing them to just back off and lessen the input, from that hot tap. Make sure that we also teach people how to respond appropriately to appeasement.

Do they understand that puppies who are gathering information actively are not showing affection, so the licking, the leaning, all of these behaviours which are so easily misinterpreted. And for owners to understand the equal roles of these different responses to negative emotions. So if they, if their puppy is fearful and anxious, that it's just as important to acknowledge that in a puppy that's trying to avoid, or a puppy that's being intensely appeasing, or a puppy that's just sitting really still inhibiting and taking information in, as it is with one that's growling or showing a repulsion behaviour.

And we want owners to learn how to read signs of increasing canine emotional arousal to understand those displacement behaviours so that they see that something is about to go wrong, rather than trying to mop up something when it has gone wrong. So if we look at the breeder, the relevance of the sink relates primarily to genetics and early rearing, so optimising genetic influence, minimising physiological stress, and establishing positive emotional responses is, is within the breeder's remit. And also reducing emotionless, salience by habituation and socialisation should start in the breeder's environment because obviously the best time to be doing this is before they're 8 weeks of age.

We also, during that time, want to start availability of chewing and sleep. The breeding stock, of course, we need to remember that in many situations, the primary driving factor for this is actually either confirmation or performance depending on whether it's in the show world or in the working world and temper and temperament and emotional stability are very much . A lower factor in terms of selection criteria, and that's something that we really do need to think about to give it at least equal consideration to confirmation and performance is this ability to be emotionally stable, so that we select genetics which give us the best possibility of having a decent sized sink.

And also, bitches showing repulsion responses are often not selected because we know that that's seen as a negative behaviour, something we don't want to see. But what we do need to remember is that when you're in that negative emotional state, repulsion, to get the thing you're worried about to go away, is just one of the potential ways to respond. So inhibition, so the bitch that just sits and just takes information in, so like the little chihuahua here, or avoidance and inhibition, as you can see in this beagle, or appeasement, as you can see in this Jack Russell.

Although those behaviours. May not be seen as problematic in their own right by many people. If you see that in bitches which may potentially be used for breeding, those are just as important as caveats as red flags to say, no, this is not a suitable bitch for breeding.

Also remember that those emotions that lead to physiological stress, that's the chemical changes within the body that come from those emotional situations, they're really important. The stress, physiological stress is as normal as the emotions are. So if there's a justified emotion, that physiological stress response.

It is adaptive. It's a way of maintaining emotional homeostasis. So we need to make sure we don't think always of stress as being always negative.

So, acute physiological stress is adaptive, it's normal, and it's something that we want to be exposed to. It's the differentiation between acute and chronic stress that's important. So having an anxiety fear response to something you've never seen before, like a snail, can be absolutely normal, and the acute physiological response that happens is preparing your body to be able to take action that will protect you.

But living in a suboptimal Environment in a situation where you have no control, where you are in a negative emotional state, which is being triggered constantly and therefore resulting in a physiological response which is ongoing chronic stress, that is going to be hugely detrimental. And so when we look at the care of pregnant bitches and thinking about that HPA axis, we need To remember that in utero, if the mother is in a chronic state of stress, then that adversely affects the development of the puppies. So as well as monitoring puppy, bitches, sorry, during their pregnancy for their physical health, for their nutritional needs, things that our profession is very good at, we also need to think about the emotional health of that bitch during her pregnancy.

So the bitch on the left-hand side is going to be in a much better emotional state for carrying those puppies than the one on the right-hand side. The one on the left-hand side, if something suddenly startles that bitch, she may well show an acute negative emotional response with an acute physiological response to that, which is not detrimental to the development of her puppies. It's the chronic physiological stress that's important.

Obviously, the other thing to think about is afterbirth, the potential for that unresolved negative emotional motivation in a bitch is going to affect those puppies, and making sure that when they're lactating, these bitches are also in a positive emotional state, where negative emotions are purely those that are justified and and short-lived. So, again, you can see a massive. Here in the emotional health of these two lactating bitches.

The one on the right-hand side is relaxed and, in a positive emotional state. The one on the, in the middle picture here, clearly in a negative emotional state while these puppies are suckling. These puppies are getting nutrition from that mother, but they're getting negative emotional influence.

So we must remember that Neonatal puppies communicate with the world around them. They communicate as well from the moment they're born. So yes, of course, there's a delay in puppies before visual and auditory communication is being utilised, because their eyes and their ears are not open when they're born.

But they're still engaging with their mom and with the environment through tactile and olfactory input, and that can still be detrimental even before their eyes and ears are open. Obviously, once they become more sensory function sensory functional, so they start to have input from all of their senses, then we really need to think about the environment that these puppies are in. We want them to be having positive emotional input, which is steady and stable and not overwhelming.

So positive emotional responses from the bitch at this point are also going to be really important for laying that foundation in her offspring to have positive expectation. If Mum is relaxed when she's around them, relaxed in the environment where they're being reared, then they will be starting from a point of positive emotional expectation. Conversely, if we have a bitch who's in a negative emotional state like this poor bitch here, you can see that that will have a negative effect as well on the puppy.

Even at this really early stage, when they're just born, you will have a negative emotional influence. So the role of the breeder is shaping not only the size of the sink, but also that emotional bias to create puppies who have positive expectation. Because we want living alongside humans to be mutually beneficial for both species.

So, for many of the dogs, the things that we want them to do are actually based on natural behavioural tendencies. So if we have search and rescue dogs or retrievers or herding dogs, we're often working on things that are naturally part of the way that they would be motivated, and we're just using that in a certain context. For others, there may be no natural basis, so there's no natural behaviour which is equivalent to showing.

So if we think about that, the preparation needed is going to be greater. If you're going to do a job that you have a natural aptitude to, then you will not struggle as much in the training process. If you're going into a job for which you're having to learn all of those skills from scratch, you have no innate ability, then we really do need to think about putting extra work into that in order for it to be beneficial, mutually beneficial.

For both the person and the dog. And there are some dogs who go through good, training and good habituation to the environment of showing who can show positive emotional responses, but many of them are not prepared sufficiently for the unfamiliarity of this environment in terms of natural behaviour. So early positive introduction to the environments in which this puppy is destined to live is important.

We want puppies to be reared in environments that suit the ultimate home. And that's gonna be different for a working border collie and a pet retriever. So, whether I'm Going to be reared in a barn or not, is not just a straightforward barns are bad, houses are better.

It's whether that dog is going to live in a barn for the rest of its life and be a working outdoor dog, or whether that puppy is going to live in a domestic environment and be an indoor pet. And so socialisation, habituation, this process of learning positive emotional responses, is it got, has got to be context specific. We need the animal to learn about the environment that it will ultimately spend its life in.

And obviously, for domestic dogs, we need to remember that that's often quite diverse, because we often want to not only have a dog who lives with us in our own home, but also goes with us into many other contexts. So we want to be able to take our companion animal dogs with us. So we need to be mindful of that during the process of socialisation and habituation.

So it needs to continue in the new home. Readers need to inform owners of what they've done already, give guidance as to how they can carry that on, and make sure that the complexity which is needed, comes in a positive and controlled environment. And we need to remember that the vet visit is an incredibly specific experience, another one like the show environment for which there isn't really any natural preparation.

So experiencing the waiting room, the consulting room is important from a very early age in ways that have positive emotional bias to it. So this is a good place to be. Some puppies obviously find themselves in hospitalisation, the ones that are not ill during puppyhood probably only go into the waiting room in the consulting room.

But creating that positive emotional connection with the veterinary experience is absolutely vital, particularly at this young age, where this process is the process of that emotional capacity, is forming. So the valence during your exposure, puppies need to be exposed to complexity in this positive emotional context. If they are having experiences but are in a negative emotional state during them, they will become sensitised.

So sensitization is a learning process which occurs when you experience things in a negative emotional state. So it's not just about exposure. And it's really important that we give a scientifically valid, piece of advice to our puppy owners, that we don't just say to them, Lots of exposure is the right thing to do, just do loads of things with your puppy.

But we explain about the importance of that puppy being in a positive state. If you take your puppy wrapped in a blanket when it's really little and sit beside a main road with juggernauts going past, the puppy's shaking in your arms and peeing. Into the blanket, you are not habituating it to traffic, you're sensitising it.

And so many times we do see puppies developing into adults within with behavioural and emotional problems because of inappropriate exposure, sensitization, rather than socialisation. So it's not just about exposure. That means that I think as a veterinary profession we need to be a little bit careful of things like tick lists, the socialisation charts.

They can be really helpful because they give an understanding to the owner of the complexity. That their puppy needs to encounter. But they can also, particularly for a really overenthusiastic owners, they can create problems rather than prevent them, because the owner is so keen to get their puppy into all of these environments and meet all of these different things that actually they're not paying enough attention to the emotional state that the.

Puppies in during that exposure. And actually, if we look at this particular example, this is just one example. There are many.

Yes, the puppy on the top right, left hand, sorry, image, the top left hand image is a puppy in a positive emotional state. If you look at the puppy in the bottom right-hand corner, that puppy is in a negative state. And so, if you see a puppy looking like that, the process you're risking is sensitization.

Also, we need to remember that when we're aiming for emotional stability, for emotional intelligence, this is the ability to express your emotions in the appropriate way, the flow rate is just as important as which emotion is being triggered. So if we have emotional states that are very positive, but are excessive in their flow rate, that could also lead to a problem of balance. So in other words, the size of the sink and the efficiency of the drainage system need to be balanced with the input.

So simply exposing puppies to lots of very high arousal experiences, even if they are happy experiences, may not be beneficial. So really what we're talking about is the importance to see things from a canine perspective, to make sure our owners know that puppies learn, and that they learn things both inappropriately and appropriately. So, in this picture with the set, we've got an appropriate association between delivery of food as a consequence of a behaviour.

And on the right hand side, we have a puppy that's jumped into the middle of the dining room table and found the joint, and therefore has had a positive emotional consequence through finding food from a behaviour that was inappropriate of jumping into the middle of the table. So, when we're talking about learning, we need to remember that learning is something that happens all of the time. It happens whether we want it to or not, and our job as the guardians and caregivers of small puppies is to set them up, that the consequences that they are learning are appropriate, that they're related to appropriate behaviours.

And we need to remember that dogs have a different perception, so things like sensitivity to sound, for example. So we can use sound and we can. Forget that that puppy's perception of that sound may be much higher, much more concentrated.

It may have much more significance to the puppy than it has to the person. And also that communication signals can mean different things. So we need to make sure that puppies are getting the right sort of information.

They have really highly developed senses. They can pick up on signals that the owner is actually unaware of, that they didn't realise that they were actually giving any message to the puppy. So having an awareness of seeing things from a canine perspective is important.

We also need to make sure that they don't always interpret situations in the way we expect them to. So we need to think about, do we think this is a beneficial situation or does the dog genuinely find it beneficial. So here we've got a picture taken at a puppy, day class, you know, puppy, puppy group, what do they call them, puppy school type situation.

And what we've got here is a, is a group photo to show how everybody's enjoying being in this group. But if we look carefully at it, you can see in these three individuals, actually, there are signs that maybe they're not enjoying it as much as the humans want to believe that they are. So looking at the body language of the individual puppy during the exposure is really important.

Is this Weimaraner in the pub having as good a time as the people in the pub are having by having the dog there? If we look at his body language, we have signs of negative emotion. And again, with the beagle that's being introduced to the child, are we seeing in that dog positive emotional interpretation?

Yes, we're seeing smiling human faces, but what is the dog perceiving of the situation? And anybody can get that wrong, however important they may think they are. They may also misinterpret, so remember that behaviours that humans use, such as hugging the dog, kissing the dog, hugging each other as well.

Remember that when humans hug each other and come together in a huddle, that the canine perception of that is that you're worried about something. Dogs go into a cuddle when there's something to be worried about. So when the child throws themselves into the puppy's neck and cuddles them, then that is showing the puppy there is something wrong in the environment.

And again, this puppy that you see in the bottom here with the child is being sensitised to children. And that's really important because that can lead to a problem for the owners, which they're not expecting. They think they've done lots of socialisation.

They end up with an individual who has problems interacting socially. That can really cause a lot of distress for the caregiver. So preventative behavioural medicine is in the remit of every practise during puppy vaccinations and appointments and post-purchase checks, we need to be giving information about behavioural development.

And we can do that by offering practical advice about what emotional health is. And about this concept of intelligence, that it's the ability to control, express your emotions that's important. We can do that through literature, through intelligence classes for puppies, nursing clinics for adolescent canine patients.

And when I'm Talking about intelligence classes for puppies. I'm not just talking about obedience, or even just about habituation to the veterinary environment. What we're talking about is addressing the importance of emotional health, encouraging social learning, and teaching owners how to understand this whole concept of emotional health and emotional stability.

So, There's a course that's available to veterinary nurses, an online course, which is also coupled with a practical weekend course at the end of it, which is an optional, extra. So you can do the online course as a standalone course, and you can then go on and do the practical course called Developing Emotional Intelligence for puppies. If you want more information about that, if you contact, that CPD or you contact.

Deep that those initials at and then BRVP.co.uk you can get more information about that course.

The role of being a puppy advocate, which so the deep classes are aiming to produce veterinary nurses who can be puppy advocates within practises, so you can prepare puppies for this life as a domestic dog. Both in the veterinary context, but also at home. So we have not only dogs that are happy to come into the vets, but also have a good emotional life at home, and therefore are less likely to have the health risks of living in a negative emotional state.

So it's more than just running classes. It's about making sure as well that you advise puppies how to interact, advise all your colleagues how to interact with puppies, so you have a, a positive. Role model, if you like, in a puppy advocate who can teach the rest of the staff and can make sure that we are making friendly practises.

Friendly practises are not just for cats. We do tend to put a lot of emphasis on cats, and quite rightly so, because they're so different from us. But one of the dangers of that is that we think that dogs are so similar to us that they will just cope.

They are not humans. They do have similarities to us, but they need to be able to be prepared for coming into these very abnormal situations. And creating a dog friendly practise is just as important as creating a cat friendly practise.

And then finally, looking at adolescence. So puppies, certainly, that's where we can do a great deal of work in benefiting emotional intelligence and maximising emotional stability. But remember that when they can become adolescent, and that will vary with their breeds, so it's usually earlier for smaller breeds of dogs.

So, it can encompass quite a, a different range of ages. So it's basically from when they reach sexual maturity to when they become socially mature. Remember that during adolescence, there are hormones starting to play a role in their behavioural responses.

There are distractions that come from that, so an inability to concentrate. And often at this time, it's a real danger time for people. To lose confidence in their relationship with their animal, to find that they can't cope with the pet.

It's one of the most problematic times in terms of relinquishment to rescue, and very often that relinquishment is related to behavioural concerns. And some of those concerns may be the onset of emotional disorders, and some of them may be normal canine behaviours like this little dog here being expressed in ways that are not acceptable in a human context. And so having adolescent classes in your practise is really important because this age, when they are so at risk in terms of behaviour, is a time when often veterinary practises No contact with these patients.

In other words, they've been in, they've had their vaccinations, they've gone through, coming in for neuting if that was appropriate. And now they're in this period between the first vaccination course and the booster when we have little contact with them. We can remedy that by inviting these owners back at this time, specifically for adolescent classes.

And during that time, we can speak to owners about their experiences, we can inform them about what's normal and what's potentially not normal and therefore we need to investigate further and we can give them support and we can dispel the myths, the things that they will be hearing in society, in inappropriate. Programmes by people in the park, things about dominance, things about male hormones. So the idea that, oh, you must remove the male hormones, because they're definitely gonna become aggressive if they're male.

The role of neutering that, oh, if he's male, we must neuter him. There's a lot of myths out there that these owners are getting exposed to. And if we don't have contact with them between the 2nd vaccination and their 1st booster, then we're really missing out on a period when both the animal is quite vulnerable, but also the owner is gonna be targeted with a lot of misinformation.

So adolescent clinics allow you to discuss behavioural problems that have the potential to become more serious. So remember that a small dog that's jumping up or a small puppy jumping up may be very different in terms of the potential for causing difficulty for the owner legally as well, than a dog that's jumping up when it's full size. We also need to remember that jumping up may be a Sign that the animal is also emotionally struggling.

Walking on the lead, that's something, again, that may start off as just a, oh, it's a puppy, and, oh, you'll grow out of it. If we don't tackle it in this adolescent phase, it could become a much more serious problem, as could the lack of recall, mouthing behaviour, and also learning to socially interact with other dogs appropriately. So really nipping it in the bud during the adolescent period is really important.

And also, at this point, you can teach them how to identify fearful behaviour, which is not necessarily repulsion. The avoidance, the inhibition, and the appeasement. If we picked up on this in adolescence in dogs more than we do, we'd be able to prevent a great deal of ultimate behavioural problems.

And many of them could have been nipped in the bud at this. Really important time. So the underlying emotion may be exactly the same, but the repulsion behavioural response often has more extensive consequences, more likely to be picked up.

We need to also be looking for those inhibited, appeasing and avoiding puppies. So rearing emotionally stable puppies is complex. It's really not something that's gonna happen by accident.

It requires a great deal of thought and patience. Breeders, guardians of caregivers in the veterinary profession, we all need to be educated in aspects of normal dog behaviour, so we understand what is normal, what animals have got as a an innate tendency, and what are things that we really need to be teaching them from scratch. And we also need to understand emotional motivations, what are they?

Where do they come from? Why are they triggered? And with that, the concepts of emotional stability and emotional intelligence.

Our job as a profession is to safeguard the health and welfare of puppies. Health and welfare includes physical and emotional aspects, and developing an emotional intelligence is going to be a key to the puppies growing into dogs who are sociable, confident, most importantly, adaptable. And if they are those things, they can be successful members of society.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Sarah. That was absolutely brilliant.

It's really interesting points that people can take home. So we do have a couple of questions already. I'd just like to remind our listeners to hover over the bottom of the screen and just click the Q&A box and send your questions through to me and I'll read it out to Sarah if you do have any.

And just before we go to the questions, once you've finished the webinar, a short feedback form will appear in your browser. Please just take a couple of seconds to fill this in so that we can provide some feedback to Sarah and also tailor the future webinars to meet your needs. OK.

I'm just gonna put a slide up while you're, while you're looking at the questions, I'm just gonna put this slide up as well for the people to look at if you, if you want help with behavioural cases. So, so while, while we're answering the questions, people can just, find out a little bit more about the, behavioural advice subscription service that we offer to people in general practise. Fab.

OK, few questions. So the first question is from Victoria. Do we have any explanation to why a dog needs so much more sleep compared to a person or other mammals?

No, it's a species specific need. There are lots of, of animals that have much higher sleep requirements than human beings do. We also have different, activity patterns in different species.

So, for example, cats are designed to have, multiple periods of sleep during the day, pardon me, interspersed with, very, active periods, which are a short duration, whereas we. Have, our physiology is designed for us to have long periods of awake, so having periods of being awake and active for long periods and then sleeping for long periods. So, we have completely different patterns.

Now it's gonna be to do with, the species' behaviour in terms of survival. So in terms of hunting, availability. Of prey.

It's also to do with your metabolism and with things like the proportion of your skeleton to your internal organs. So all of those things determine the balance as to what sort of activity patterns you see in different species. Fab, thank you.

And another one from Sue. Do you think neutering during adolescence is advisable? It totally depends on the individual animal and I think that's the most important message about neutering is that every case should be made, every decision should be made on an individual case basis.

First of all, why do you want to neuter? So I think we should always start every discussion about neutering with what is the aim of neuting? Why are we doing this?

And is that aim realistic in terms of what neutering actually achieves? So neutering is only going to remove the hormonal components, so the, the lust motivation will be altered, by neutering. The care motivation will be changed but not removed in a socially obligate mammal, for example.

So we need To say, what is the reason for this? Are we doing this because we don't want to produce any puppies? Certainly, neutering is going to be effective for that, or are we doing it because we want to remove a certain behavioural response?

So we need to know whether that behavioural response is appropriate, for neutering. Does it have a motivation which will be affected by neutering? My worry about neutering is not that it happens.

I think there are many medical reasons why we may say that it is a sensible thing to do. My worry about it is a blanket advice to neuter every animal at a certain age. That's what, what's not appropriate.

So would I advise neutering of an adolescent animal? It would. Depend on the reason why the nutrient was being thought about.

If it's just being done just because, then, no, I wouldn't do it. But if it's being done for a reason, I want to know what is that reason? What is the risk for the animal, for the population, for population control, and then make a decision based on that individual information.

OK, and what is the best advice to give a family with small children socialising with a puppy? Should we be discouraging hugging like in the photo? Absolutely.

Absolutely. Hugging is not something which is seen by dogs as a sign of affection. So when we're looking at introducing children and dogs, we need to do so in a way that respects both species.

We need to remember that children have certain needs as well. So they need to find the interaction beneficial, but that needs to be beneficial to the dog as well. So things like, I don't know if you're aware of the Blue Dog Project, which is a living.

Safety with your dog project for small children between the ages of 3 and 6. That's, an app that you can download from the App Store, for Androids and for Apple. So you can download that and then you basically you work through, a little story with the child, that looks at how to interact and what's beneficial, both for the dog and for the child.

And obviously, with the aim of, of, reducing the risk of any repelling behaviour towards children. But not just about, what's sometimes referred to as dog bite prevention. This is about living deadly with your dog.

The other thing to think about, is introducing dogs to the sounds of children, before children arrive if the dog's there first. You can do that using the sound soothing soundtracks, which are downloadable from the Dogs Trust website. They're free of charge.

So any owner can download the both the booklet and the sound files from the Dogs Trust website. So there are lots of things available for us to help owners in this preparation. Of having dogs and children living together.

There's lots of evidence that living with a dog is beneficial to a child in terms of their development, and dogs living with people can benefit. What's important is that both species are benefiting from the interaction. The same is true, and I'm not going to wanting to open a whole can of worms tonight, but the same is true with assistance dogs.

You, is it OK to have pet dogs? Is it OK to have dogs for autistic children? What we need to remember is that the benefit needs to be mutual, and, and that's, that's really where education is really needed.

Excellent. And you said the app was called Blue Dog Project. Yeah, it's the Blue Dog app.

So if you go into either of the app stores, the Android or the Apple one, then you can download it, from there. Oh, brilliant, that'll be really useful. And one more up to now, so I have 5 dachshunds related, but they do not like other dogs.

They are happy with, they're fine with people and they're just happy with each other. Does that matter? I guess that depends on what their life is like, so does, does it matter if they have to have interaction with other dogs, then yes, it matters.

If they are able to live a life that doesn't involve interaction with any other dogs, then no, it probably doesn't matter. It depends whether that . The emotional motivation that causes a problem with other dogs causes a problem for them in any other context.

So if exposure to other dogs can be completely removed from their life without them suffering, so they're still getting canine company cos they've got each other. They've got enough room to exercise, not in public places, so they don't have to see other dogs. Those sorts of things to protect them from the trigger of other dogs, then you're not going to have a problem with that emotional, situation.

But my big question would be, is there anything else that triggers that negative emotion for them? And is it realistic for them to live in a world where they don't interact with other dogs? And, and that may well be so if you live in a place with a lot of land of your own.

And then you may well never need to go into a public place or, or have interaction with other dogs, and, and certainly they could live their lives, in, in a, in a perfectly reasonable emotional state in that situation, so they wouldn't, they're not being challenged. So it really depends on your circumstances. OK, and we have a couple more from Charlotte.

How do you reward the most appropriate behaviour? Is it just about allowing the behaviour? It depends, again, on what the behaviour is and what motivates the individual puppy.

So, certainly, we can use food. If we're gonna use food, we've got to remember that the food should just come from the environment, like manna from heaven, rather than coming necessarily directly from the person, if we're just, creating positive Emotional associations. If we're actually, training, if we're actually getting to the point of delivering a verbal cue, then we may want the owner to be the conduit of that because we want the dog to look to the owner for instruction in situations, then we do want the treat to come directly from the person.

So it kind of depends on what you're trying to achieve. We can use anything that motivates the positive emotional systems. So desire seeking can be motivated by food, it can be motivated by social contact, it can be motivated by play.

If you're in a situation of something where you're classically conditioning, so if you're in a situation of house, training, for example, toilet training, then you don't need to add any reward or reinforcer. It's not an operant process, so you can just, the, the, positive outcome is the relieving of. Of pressure from the bladder and the bowel, and the classical conditioning is about being in the right place at the right time, but doesn't need any external reward.

So, it depends what which form of learning is involved and what you're trying to achieve, and it depends on, on the individual dog in terms of what would be used as a positive consequence. OK, and finally, how do you recommend owners allow dogs to obtain access to resting places and food in a way that they can control? OK, so things like, the biggest problem that we see with, with puppies, with food, for example, is the owners unintentionally induce a lot of confrontation in terms of, frustration.

So they get the food ready, and then they, they, the puppy knows it's there, but it can't get access. To it, or they put it down and make them wait for for a long time for a puppy, so remember that that the time scale is, is from the puppy's perception, not the person's, or they make them do some, you know, obedience cu reactions before they can have access to the food. So what's important is to remember that we don't want to be frustrating that access, particularly in a small puppy.

So what can be useful is to do things like put the food down while the puppy's not around, and then open the door and they go in and the food is there, rather than the person holding it back. If you're at the point where, you're actually training a, a manners cue, a polite behaviour. Yeah.

It's perfectly acceptable to get the puppy to sit, and then the bowl goes down and they can eat it, but not to withhold it to the point where the puppy's getting frustrated. So there's a difference between just having manners, which means that you can put the bowl down without getting mugged, and you can put the bowl down without food getting scattered. That's just teaching a practical, responsible.

Behavioural, reaction from the puppy. But the puppy's still got a level of control, because they know that if they sit quietly, they'll get the food. What we don't want them to do is be sitting in a situation where they're, there's the food.

I don't know how I get it. What have I done wrong? Why can't I get it?

Why is it being withheld? That's when we start to get the possibility of frustration and conflict in the situation of access to food. And the same with beds as well, that Basically, we want the bed to be available.

If you want to put it on a queue so that you can ask them to go onto the bed, that's absolutely appropriate. That, again, it would be in the context of training and manners. But the puppy is not being put in a situation where it has a desire seeking motivation to get to a resource and is then being denied access to it in a way that leads to frustration.

Brilliant, thank you very much, Sarah. That seems to be the end of our questions. So I'd like to just thank all of our members for logging on tonight.

I'm sure you've all had long days at work, so we really appreciate you logging on and thank you very much, Sarah, for such a great talk and enjoy the rest of your evening.